In the West African nation of Mali, the situation is rapidly disintegrating for large swaths of population as Islamist radicals intent on imposing religious law are spreading their power. On the ground in a nation in peril.

Tuesday July 31, 2012, 4:04 am
Ira, religious clergy of all stripes and the extremists who cling to them are determined to impose social order on the masses. This despite the fact that the principles of all religions are contained in the ten Commandments--do't steal, respect your neighbors, don't kill, don't violate the rights of others, etc. If you observe these, whether you're religious or even believe in G-d or not, you'll be fine and a positive enough force in society. The masses don't need more doctrine than that from anyone purporting to speak for G-d!

Tuesday July 31, 2012, 10:07 am
Obama shouldn't do anything - this is for the people of Mali to decide, not for us to meddle in. Would you like it if Chinese troops and carriers showed up ready to "help" us with our problems? Think about it.

Tuesday July 31, 2012, 11:14 am
Cynthia, Obama got plenty of Muslim Brotherhood firends - these are the people who are running now every show in many Islamic countries.

Obama could implement Canadian pipeline to scare Sauids of their oil influence. He could tell them to stop Islamist militias. He could arrange for less funding going indirectly to Islamic militias and to states - adversaries of US.

At the very last, he could just say something in UN, at the time US Aid of US Aid allocation, and on many other occasions the most powerful man on Earth has.

Tuesday July 31, 2012, 9:07 pm
Janet, I agree with you on NOT sending people. But some simple things Obama could do if he wanted: Jihad needs lots of cash. Cash can come from either Iran, or Saudis. Iran is under sanctions, and its best servants Hesbola in Lebanon are getting into troubles.

Obama could off squeeze Saudis. Instead, he bowed to Saudi King, let Muslim Brotherhood to take over the whole Middle East, let Muslim Brotherhood people decide US foreign and internal policy - they excluded Egyptian and Syrian Christians from the picture completely, threw long-time ally Mubarak to the dogs, etc.

With such policy, Obama can be seen as implicitly OK-ing what is going on. I am sure he has enough leverages against Saudis to force them to stop or decrease funding of Islamic extremists.

Wednesday August 1, 2012, 6:58 am
This growing Orthodox Muslim violence in imposing Sharia law on any land they occupy is a problem from northern Nigeria to Mali, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Malaysia, Chechnya, Maldives to Indonesia, et al, and they are beheading little Buddhist kids in southern Thailand trying to force non-Muslims out of the area so they can create a pure Islamic zone, as they are doing in the Phillipines and even in some European cities like Malmo, Sweden where the 25% Muslim population has taken over one section of the city and established sharia law where the locals won't go and even the police fear to enter. Dearborn, Michigan is becoming one of these zones too with no opposition from anyone.

The ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims (or even the 'wrong' kind of Muslim) is happening all over the Muslim ruled world and where are the western leaders and mainstream media? Nowhere.

You know if these were Muslims being persecuted, burned out, murdered, cleansed and houses of worship destroyed that Obama would speak out and send in the troops to protect them. But he even refused to meet with a group of Christian leaders from the Middle East who came to beg for his intervention to stop the ethnic cleansing of them in the area - and they are the original peoples in all these lands before Islam's conquest.

But Obama is, again, backing the Muslim Brotherhood-led revolt against Assad in Syria even though the MB is financed by the tyrannical Saudis and backed by al-Qaeda! Under Assad, a member of a religious minority himself which have been persecuted by the MB/Saudi/al-Qaeda-backed Sunni rebels, the non-Sunni Muslims have fared well, but the rebels are already attacking the minorities and they know that if the 'rebels' win there will be a blood bath and ethnic cleansing of the Christians, Alawites and Druze, all of whom make up 25% of the population. The Christians are the original Syrians before the Muslim conquest.

Wednesday August 1, 2012, 8:02 am
Surely this is just a continuation of the highly successful Arab-Islamic colonization of Africa that started in North Africa and has steadily been moving southwards for well over a thousand years.

Wednesday August 1, 2012, 9:15 am
Obama's total silence on the plight of Christians victims of muslim violence and hatred in Muslim lands, as well as his antipathy towards Israel (except when forced for political reasons), leads me to believe that Obama would have been the Neville Chamberlain of WWII.

Wednesday August 1, 2012, 10:29 am
The disaster in Mali happened because of Libya. There are many war trained Tuaregs who fought in Libya and there many weapons lying around even though a large amount were given to Muslims in other African countries to support their fight against Christianity. In fact, many of their weapons are those provided to them by America to help the Christians defend themselves against such an attack. Unfortunately, the Malis do not have sufficient experience to deal with this attack.

Remember that this started with the destruction of a world heritage site in Timbuktu.

No-one seems interested in helping these poor people and, if not stopped, the Muslims will spread and dominate/kill non-Muslims. It will continue through Africa if no-one interferes.
ey only
It is interesting that many on this board say do not interfere yet they probably want the Palestinians to be supported and to stop the war in Syria. We helped in Libya yet nothing is ever said or done about the terrible suffering of Africans. Sure, Help the Children doles out food to the starving but if all that happens is that these children will become slaves or soldiers then is that a righteous saving or are they only salving their consciences? Or, as is more likely, the food ends up with the soldiers who are killing and enslaving the populations, is that a good way to spend money?

Wednesday August 1, 2012, 10:29 am
The disaster in Mali happened because of Libya. There are many war trained Tuaregs who fought in Libya and there many weapons lying around even though a large amount were given to Muslims in other African countries to support their fight against Christianity. In fact, many of their weapons are those provided to them by America to help the Christians defend themselves against such an attack. Unfortunately, the Malis do not have sufficient experience to deal with this attack.

Remember that this started with the destruction of a world heritage site in Timbuktu.

No-one seems interested in helping these poor people and, if not stopped, the Muslims will spread and dominate/kill non-Muslims. It will continue through Africa if no-one interferes.
ey only
It is interesting that many on this board say do not interfere yet they probably want the Palestinians to be supported and to stop the war in Syria. We helped in Libya yet nothing is ever said or done about the terrible suffering of Africans. Sure, Help the Children doles out food to the starving but if all that happens is that these children will become slaves or soldiers then is that a righteous saving or are they only salving their consciences? Or, as is more likely, the food ends up with the soldiers who are killing and enslaving the populations, is that a good way to spend money?

Thursday August 2, 2012, 1:37 am
The so-called "Arab Spring" was nothing more than a Muslim Brotherhood power grab ....
the Islamist Winter has set in, and God help the people. We will see more and more atrocities in North Africa & the Middle East, unfortunately .

Thursday August 2, 2012, 8:35 am
I think the analogy is more correct than many realize:

The rebellion began, if I recall correctly, in the former territory of the Sokoto Caliphate and with its cultural descendants The rest of Mali is mostly culturally descended from the Songhai Empire. The trouble began a long, long time ago as can be seen by the fact that this appears to be the third such rebellion in recent history, after one in the 1960s and another in the early 1990s. I could make an analogy to another well-known case of cultural descendants of a Caliphate fighting cultural descendants of classical empires in a protracted conflict, but I think everybody here can draw that connection and see things like what the other region would look like with different power-relations there.

Anyways, this is total war and ought to be treated as such. The Sokoto culture, not only the fighters themselves but the recruitment-pool from which they came, is incompatible with the Songhai (or normal social progress, but that is another matter) and ought to be crushed, though preferably without physical annihilation if practical. Unfortunately, the previous government refused to crack down on these rebels even after the rebellion started. The military coup that took them from power over this left Mali weak in its fight against these rebels. I wish outside forces could help, but the war is so far inland that it would be logistically very difficult for even the U.S. to intervene meaningfully. Now we are looking at straight-up al Qaeda-held territory.